98 ,/ SHOUTS & MUR.MUR.S :r: ST spring, my oldest son was given the opportunity, along with everybody else in his sixth- grade English class, to present an oral book report on "any novel that he wanted." At the time, he happened to be reading "Billy Bunter and the Blue Mauritius," by Frank Richards (the pen name of the author Charles Hamilton). He'd already finished "Bunter Does His Best" and "Bunter the Bad Lad." Billy Bunter is a famous-perhaps the most famous-schoolboy in En- glish juvenile fiction. He first appeared in a comic strip in the magazine Mag- net in 1908 and remained there un- til wartime paper shortages closed down the magazine, in 1940. Bunter reëmerged after the war and went on to strut his stuff-school blazer, checked pants, black waistcoat, yellow polka- dot bow tie-in thirty-eight of his creator's novels. Richards' books are still widely read in England. A few fac- simile editions of the original hard- backs, published in the U.K. in 1991 and 1992, somehow found their way into the remainders section of my local bookstore, in Newton, Massa- chusetts. I bought five and passed them on. The thing about Bunter is he's fat. His best pals like to heckle him. To them he's "The Fat Owl of the Remove," a "frabjous fathead," a "fat h "".c. " ( h ,,, " c ump, a lat ass t at s ass, not " " ) d h h ".c. arse , an a person w 0 as lat thoughts." At Greyfriars School, he's an object of ridicule but also of affec- tion. He's always borrowing money against the collateral of a postal order from his parents, which never arrives. He gets into terrible comic scrapes of an Edwardian variety involving low- . \. ßUNTER BY JONATHAN WILSON class lads from the local racecourse or upper-class bounders and cads from the ranks of his own schoolmates. His perennial antagonist is his form mas- ter, Mr. Qyelch, a caner and ear- tweaker supreme, with whom Bunter engages in an endless conversational pitch-and-toss of accusation and rebut- tal. In the end, Bunter always emerges from his tribulations chastened but triumphant. Like a few million kids before him, my son found the Bunter books very funny. I heard him laugh out loud while he was reading, which doesn't happen all that often. My son is no egghead; he is a fan (and defender) of Snoop Doggy Dogg, and is fully American in all his interests and activi- ties. He is a wearer of layered oversIzed clothes. Like most Americans, he pre- fers talking to reading. There aren't many subjects that he is afraid to dis- BILLY BUNTER OF GRETFRIARS SCHOOL (it " ...... .... FRANK &ICHARDS cuss in front of his teachers; one is the boy who peruses the Victoria's Secret catalogue under his desk during math, and Billy Bunter, an English schoolboy with a weight problem circa 1908-60 (the years pass, but Bunter & Com- pany are preserved in public-school as- pic), turned out to be another. When I pressed him to pass on his obvious enthusiasm for the works via the oral book report, he turned white and said, " ^ "'\" rue you crazy!" At first, I thought he was embar- rassed by the idea of accentuating the uncool, British-influenced side of his personality, but, no, it turned out that while I wasn't watching he had been inhaling the Zeitgeist. He ex- plained that he would rather take the consequences of seeming to have read nothing than risk coming off as "insensitive" in front of his classmates and teacher by promoting a book that was hard on the abdominally challenged. Here was a new twist on the guilty pleasures of reading. I persevered, ar- guing, boringly, that his teacher, an open-minded person working in a lib- eral environment, would be quite ca- pable of turning whatever came up in class into a useful discussion. But the long reach of P.C. had my son by the throat, and before you could say "Buns of Steel" he had ordered me from his room. In the end, he discussed "Bridge to Terabithia," a novel he had yawned Ô through in fifth grade, which caused a furor in Oskaloosa, Kansas, last year, on account of its bad language- 8 not quite as bad, though, I guess, as "potty porpoise" and "fat guzzler." :2 As Bunter himself might have put it, g: Oh crikey!. @